


Courier

by newcanaan



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-03-28 08:40:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13900389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newcanaan/pseuds/newcanaan
Summary: "A package courier found shot in the head near Goodsprings has reportedly regained consciousness and made a full recovery. Now that is a delivery service you can count on."*under construction*





	1. Chapter 1

When Jamie awoke in the bed she found that she was alone. In the night she was been stirred by an inconsolable belief that he had left her, and she found the other side of the bed deserted. She had thought it was a dream.

His absence was replaced by the cold; she ran her knuckles over the silk sheets and shivered.

Jamie looked over her shoulder. The sunlight was seeping through the curtains, drifting aimlessly by the window, and painting the room in its morbid shades of red.

The room around her was lavished in crimson: the bed sheets, the walls, the roses drained on the bottom of the bath tub. Even the dresser was draped in fake rubies, made to be the imbecilic enamouring of a human heart. She clamoured around it.  
They had dressed the night before like the swindlers of the Old World, him in his pressed suit and his gentleman’s laughter and his wild dog’s grin. She descended down to the courtyard in black lace and white embroidery all dolled up that night. The night had died hours ago.

There were a trail of pins between the bed and the door, leaving her hair in its wild, pale locks spilled onto the pillows that were – yes – red, red as the pain blistering her heart or the bullet that would fire into her head. It had begun to run rivers through her chest. When had she started crying, she wondered, when had she begun to leave the trail of black in the wake of that crimson wholeness?

This was not a world to be delicate in. She ought to have learned that by now. But its severity could not match the blossoming of her cupid heart, that’s petals filled her lungs until she suffocated in love.

He fucking left, she turned on her side.  There was no history there to be repeated. Her head had fallen over the edge of the bed.

The room did not want to let her go. She was the final memento of that glorious time: the dollars they counted and the bath running over with champagne and her intoxicating need as she waited on the heat of the bed for the man to never return.

Her underwear was strewn on the floor, slick in the night in her fever that had come from the thought of him, from the ghost of the touch he did not leave on her.

That phantom man, he would be the death of her.

Jamie found her breath. She slipped her legs over the side. Holding the sheet around her, she went over to the dresser. There were a few pieces hanging up, underclothes mostly, and half a pack of cigarettes. Jamie lit one before doing anything else.

He used to hang his suit on the back of the chair there – that checkerboard, dandy boy suit he always wore. Her fingers traced the back of it. That fucking snake.

He still might come to the door, whispering roses in her garden of all manner of unearthly hopes, spent from a night of blowing all the money she won to his name and she’d only be obliged to thank God for his return. Forever was an awfully long time to be alone.

She was standing in front of the bathroom mirror. “Pretty as pink,” he’d say to her. She’d never worn pink before she met him. She was a woman that wore blue, blue midnights and cerulean skies hanging above her melancholy. Everything he had left in the wardrobe was pretty as pink.

Walking to the bathroom, she dropped the cigarette butt in the bath. The petals caught fire.

The Maravilla would not put up with her much longer.  
Jamie went on her hands and knees to look for anything left. A bottle of whiskey had rolled to the corner, she drained it and tasted the glass for more. She should have left by now.

Running was always what she did best. Running or waiting for him to run back to her, beg on his knees, she could not live in any space in between.

Jamie pulled on her dress and threw some mercenary clothes in a case, with the cigarettes on top. What else was there to take? A straight razor left by the sink and a bottle of perfume. That would have to do. She would pack light if she wanted to catch up with him by nightfall.

What if he came back? Perhaps she was drunk already.

Jamie would find him first.

The wind closed the door behind her. Across the balcony, the sun pulled open the windows and saw the room silent in its grief.


	2. Chapter 2

They had buried her in a shallow grave. The smoke of the cigarettes had billowed down over her body.

And that face – staring across the sky at her – which had been blurred now, washed out of her memory. She tried to remember. But her eyes would not stop streaming and her head was ablaze.

Starlight had blossomed on the endings of her nerves and for a moment she thought that somebody had set her on fire, someone had smoked the life out of her and left that lifeless carcass of a woman. The pain of it.

The woman ran her hands along the side of the bed. It was metal, cold even in the stiff air, with some dead mattress lain over it. Her hair curled in familiarity in her hand; she felt it before she could see. Platinum blond, a jarring bright against her dark skin. Perhaps that was why she had wanted it.

Her hands rose further. Darkness shrouded her eyes, which were still crying their pathetic rivers down her cheeks. Under her fingers, her lips felt rough and her skin sunburnt and the sterile numbness of her jaw was waning down to the marrow. She could taste metal and drugs and antiseptic. The jaw had been broken there. What a sight, the bone jutting out like that. Someone had fixed her. She could not pull any name from the air though.

At the top of her cheek was the edge of the bandaging. A boundary she did not want to cross. Has she been blinded? Had she taken a bullet between the eyes?

Her body juddered.

Two shots the stranger had fired. Her hands cradled the sides of her head. She’d been shot in the head. What the hell, she gasped, who the hell would leave her in that state.  
And what? She was resurrected, blind, lame, a burden that sat in the corner of the room while the world carried on without her.

Her eyes flickered with panic beneath the bandages.

And who had she been, that a stranger thought so little of her as to leave her for dead.

Her hands were covering her eyes above the coarse binding. She grasped the sides of it and ripped it away.

Sunlight flooded her. Jamie stifled another child's cry. If anyone could hear her what would they think, that she was an invalid, a pitiful creature curled up in its misery. It would smother to death on its whimpering.

She was alive. She was barely breathing, but she was still very much alive.

In agony she recalled the blue of the moon behind its clouds, the wild sight of eyes staring down at her, dauntless, and the taste of sand.   
She saw him reach for a cigarette and light it carelessly. She couldn’t remember who he was, although her heart must have known better, because it was thundering in its cage and threatened to blow her ribs away. Jamie closed her eyes. There was something left, some old affair, a love perhaps, that she could not let go of. He had pointed the gun to her chest. It fired wonderfully, spilled all the grief out of her until she had nothing left to give. War would do things like that: it would make her a mechanism of devastation, drained of all the joy and love and heartache she had known. Her arms wrapped around herself. I will never be hurt again.   
Jamie turned towards the wall. She tied the bandage back over her eyes, knowing some things were better left in the dark. She clutched the sheet in her fists and hoped the next time she had woken up she’d have forgotten him again.

-

The man had said something to her. She had not heard a word. The woman was sat upright on the bed, with her eyes vacant and her thoughts blasted back onto the earth of the cemetery. Perhaps that was how it felt to be lobotomized.

She pulled herself back, back down into her body, into the strange vessel of funeral flowers and her sand-filled lungs.

He’d asked for her name.

The woman’s expression deepened with thought. “Jamie,” she said. “My name is Jamie.”

Was that the first thing she’d said? No – then why did her throat feel so hoarse? She had awoken in the midday gloom beneath the shutters, looking like wreckage, until the man had come over to see if she would stir.

“I’m awake,” she had whispered then. Her arm was falling down the side of the bed, and she looked more like she had crashed down from the night sky in a blaze of Molotov fire than some bestial relic of the wastes left a victim now. A victim, that was what she had become. The woman could have thrashed her hands against the walls and screamed till there was blood running from her mouth. 

She remembered the doctor trying the reach for the bandages, before her instinct flared and she recoiled to pull them off herself. A stray lock fell into her eyes.

Jamie lifted her head again. The doctor had been good to her, given the circumstances. She owed him a debt for that.

He wanted her to go over to some machine at the end of the room. She did not want to ever move from the bed. The shame was branding her body in holy fire. Was there any place she could wander to then, where they did not read her name and wonder, what happened to you? Her muscles seized themselves into a dedication to rigor mortis, refusing her leave. The malevolence in the pit of heart would rather have her waiting out a death there. 

The man walked away. In the passing day she heard him voice come back - sad, comforting, and reeking of pity - echoing question and question. She only watched the pilot guide her body and her voice into submission.

They were waiting by the door. He’d given her some armoured vault suit he’d kept behind, or something like that. She had a few caps, a scrap of paper in her hand, and empty thanks on her lips. It felt like politeness. It felt like it was expected. Where the hell had she been in the time before? Who on earth was the woman she had inherited?

The sun was reaching down for her already: she held up a hand, as the blue Nevada sky painted itself over the earth, and a crow took flight in front of her. It was so bright out there. So bright she thought her eyes might burn right out of her head. Still wouldn’t be the worst thing that had happened that week, she thought.

Her feet carried her over the sand. They dragged a bit with the unexpected weight, the days of atrophy had taken their toll.

Jamie lowered her hand. God, the sun was a sight up there. It was bleeding white from its edge.

An sensation had swept over her. The awareness that there was something missing from her; a horror and a delight of her vulnerability. Her heart was stammering. 

There was no weight pressing down on her shoulder - where were her guns?

Jamie had always carried two on her back, a hunting rifle and a shotgun. On the inside of her leg she used to tie a switchblade, and then she’d throw the bag over her head, with the bottles hanging from the outside. Her hand was still on her shoulder.

“Need a gun,” she thought aloud. Her eyes reached the saloon up ahead. “And a drink”


	3. Chapter 3

“You must be the one Doc Mitchell was patching up.”

Jamie raised her head.

She was sat in the corner booth, her feet crossed on the table, a bottle of whiskey in her hand. She’d picked it up from some hung-over local comatose on the floor. Nobody seemed to have noticed, what with the Ganger making a scene. The noise hadn’t bothered her – she was glad she’d managed to slip in without incident.

Jamie managed some reply to her. She wasn’t in the mood for talking. Never had been.

The whiskey had made her feel a little more human again, at least, and the smell of the varnish and liquors of the saloon enamored her in the violent calm of her forgotten memory. That was something, she told herself, that was something. The whiskey was making her blood warm again. The torrents of calamity rushing through her head and down her temples had softened to a summer rainfall, and she swore then she could bare any pain as long as ground down on her jaw and pulled every muscle of her body taut.

“Got any cigarettes?” she asked.

The bartender looked her over. “Here.” She handed her a packet. There were only four cigarettes left. Jamie rattled them about before picking one out, then she dropped her caps in the ashtray.  
Whoever the bartender was, she’d been kind enough to leave a box of matches. Jamie scratched it against the table – making the corners of her mouth twitch – and brought the flame up. It tasted like the day before.

“What’s been going since I was out?” Jamie frowned.

“Round here we’ve had trouble with the Powder Gangers lately, threatening to come blow our town to pieces. And up north there’s the deathclaws in the quarry. Don’t know where you’re headed, stranger, but I wouldn’t go through there.”

Jamie pushed the ashtray towards her and the woman picked the caps out with a little distaste. She must have had worse than couriers in there.

“Legion and the NCR are still fighting over the dam, but as far as I’m concerned, as long as they keep out of Goodsprings they can do whatever they like.”

“You know anything about the man that shot me?” Her expression deepened.

The woman set down the glass she’d been cleaning, and took up the brush instead.

“Came by with some Great Khans passing through not long along. Made hell of a mess – broke my damn radio. The man looked like he might’ve been from the city, wearing some chequered suit, but he didn’t stay long. Didn’t seem to care what was happening while the Great Khans were protecting him.”

Before she could say anything more, the bartender had disappeared around the back. 

Drumming her fingers on the table, Jamie got to her feet and went to investigate that radio.

There wasn’t much damage to it at all, nothing she couldn't seem to fix anyway, as her hands worked the frayed wires and the dial glimmered to life.

In the blotted mirror, tarnished with dust, she caught the brief reflection of her hands between the glasses. There was a revolver sitting between them. Some old instinct told her to take it, in the reverie of the gun glowing blue underneath the moon as he fired at her, twice, and she would have forced herself to swallow the burning cigarette butts before taking. The woman pulled the door shut behind her.

It was harrowingly bright out there beneath the sun. Her body took its own direction, over the ancient, aching earth that had become virgin land to her and up towards the cemetery. Her heart was turning cold.

The graves crowning the hill were marked with crude crucifixes and handfuls of desert flowers. It was a bleak place to be buried.

Despite the high wind the night before, the smell of cigarettes was burned into the ground. Or perhaps it was her memory, daring her to snatch at it with her lover's hands. She could still taste the ground as her lungs filled with sand and she had kicked the earth in foetal remembrance.

Jamie jumped down into the grave. The sand spilled away from her boots.

The chamber around her was left raw in the open air. It was something that belonged to her, a miscarried burden of history, and she had to hide it from their eyes.

Taking the shovel, she covered it over again to hide her shame.

The cigarettes and the lighter he left had been too much for her. It was terrible, the things that made her pain real. She put them beneath a foot of earth.

Laying above the salted ground, she drank herself into a delirium that chased her across the night, her body feverish in the Mojave heat and rocking her until it was sunrise.


End file.
